EMC Symmetrix - Do you have your transition plan in place?

As you may be aware, EMC recently announced that several Symmetrix storage product family members (VMAX SE, VMAXe and VMAX 10K) have reached EOSL ‘end of service life’, with support officially ending September 30, 2017. EMC plan to focus their efforts on current and future storage products.

While this sounds like the hardware is obsolete, the truth is your VMAX systems have proven to be very reliable and offer excellent high availability functionality which means they can enjoy a much longer lifespan than September 2017. The VMAX family has sold very well for EMC resulting in healthy spare parts supply.

Using our Raytrix ESS™ solution, we can extend the life of your existing hardware, increasing your return on investment and decreasing your total cost of ownership even further. Raytrix ESS™ ensures that we can deliver OEM quality service for the EMC Symmetrix® VMAX line of products, constantly monitoring for intermittent and recoverable errors, and implementing corrective actions before issues develop as a result of component failures.

Where a genuine event is identified a RSF (Remote Support Facility) notification is created and forwarded to the CDS EMC support team via email or by modem, along with an attached snapshot of current events and a full description of the event triggering the RSF.

The CDS EMC storage support group uses the offline Raytrix ESS™ Event Viewer to analyze your ESS event log, identify the root cause of the issue, determine which actions needs to be taken and to assign a suitable level of severity that will help with defining the correct response.

Raytrix ESS™ Heartbeat Monitoring

Raytrix ESS™ has a built-in heartbeat monitoring function that can be performed weekly or daily depending on your specific requirements. Heartbeat data is collected from your EMC storage solutions and stored securely in our database.

This EMC Symmetrix Heartbeat data is analyzed daily to ensure all machines protected by CDS maintenance contracts are communicating properly and are available for support when needed.

The ESS heartbeat function makes certain that all monitored EMC Symmetrix machines are ready and able to send alerts when necessary, and that CDS can receive and process any RSF alerts that may be generated.

Raytrix ESS™ Symmetrix Diagnostics

RAYTRIX™ ESS has a collection of utilities that provide our EMC support team with the tools needed to verify the integrity of your EMC storage solutions and to carry out maintenance tasks remotely.

Inline diagnostic interfaces us to communicate directly with the Symmetrix Directors and Communications and Environmental boards built into your EMC storage solutions, so we can gather additional troubleshooting information and perform extra maintenance tasks. Raytrix ESS™ also allows CDS EMC storage support personnel to hot swap disk drives, directors and other concurrent maintenance hardware on the Symmetrix platform using an advanced scripting interface.

Additional automated scripts are used for removing hot spares, releasing software locks and performing environmental tasks like viewing or resetting alarms as and when required.

Managing your EMC Symmetrix solutions remotely

The Raytrix ESS™ suite has been designed to work securely within your network environments and to be fully compatible with your EMC storage solutions.

Raytrix ESS™ remote maintenance services use a VPN IPSEC based solution with two geographically-separated servers; a primary in the US and a secondary in Canada. Alternatively we offer an SSL- based solution with two dedicated servers; again one server is in the US and a backup is located in Canada.

We refer to these two Ethernet based solutions as RSRS or (Raytrix ESS™ Secure Remote Solution) and both were designed to provide the fastest and most reliable encrypted connection to your EMC Symmetrix assets.

Why is Raytrix ESS™ ESS unique?

CDS is the only company with access to a complete EMC Symmetrix maintenance solution - Raytrix ESS™ . Designed from the ground up as a replacement for EMC’s own management and monitoring tools, Raytrix ESS™ has helped to establish CDS as a leader in the enterprise storage maintenance arena.

CDS are proud to be the world’s largest provider of third party EMC support. Backed by an exceptional technical support team, Raytrix ESS™ has helped CDS set the standard for multivendor maintenance and support. We pride ourselves in hiring only the best and the brightest specialists capable of handling any technical support scenario.

This incredibly talented and devoted group of people is really what makes CDS special and ensures you can continue to receive market-leading levels of service.

To learn more about Raytrix ESS™, third party maintenance services and exactly how your business will benefit, please get in touch